The Knowledge Argument

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The Knowledge Argument

• Theres Something About Mary

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There are things Mary doesnt know
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Reminder Office Hour Visits

• Tuesday, March 24 Caswell, Gerards, Johnson,
  Livstrom, Moberg, Mohr.
• 3-5 PM. If you cannot make that time, please let
  me know when you can.

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This article has been very influential

• Someday there will be no more articles written
  about the Knowledge Argument That is beyond
  dispute.  What is less certain is, how much
  sooner that day will come than the heat death of
  the universe. (Bill Lycan)

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Why has it been so influential?

• Because one continually gets the sense that
  earlier 20th C. theories of mind failed to
  capture something important phenomenal
  consciousness or the qualitative aspects of
  experience.
• Phenomenal consciousness what it is like from
  your subjective point of view.

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Big changes down under

• The first wave of Australian philosophers
  (Smart, Armstrong) were materialists.
• The second wave of Aussies are dualists or
  epiphenomenalists (Jackson, Chalmers).

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David Chalmers (1966-)

• Chalmers famously distinguished between the hard
  and easy problems of consciousness.
• Question How does he distinguish between these
  two types of problems?

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Easy Puzzles of Consciousness

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and
  react to environmental stimuli
• the integration of information by a cognitive
  system
• the reportability of mental states
• the ability of a system to access its own
  internal states
• the focus of attention
• the deliberate control of behavior
• the difference between wakefulness and sleep

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Why are these easy?

• Chalmers is aware that easy is a relative term.
  He acknowledges that we are not even close to
  fully understanding these topics he writes that
  they will take centuries to solve.
• But they are easy in the sense that we know how
  to go about answering them in terms of
  computational or neural mechanisms.

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Chalmers on easy puzzles

• All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to
  explanation in terms of computational or neural
  mechanisms. To explain access and reportability,
  for example, we need only specify the mechanism
  by which information about internal states is
  retrieved and made available for verbal report.
  To explain the integration of information, we
  need only exhibit mechanisms by which information
  is brought together and exploited by later
  processes In each case, an appropriate cognitive
  or neurophysiological model can clearly do the
  explanatory work (Chalmers, Facing Up to the
  Problem of Consciousness).

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Hard problem?

• The hard problem is to explain the phenomenal
  character of experience. One might ask but why
  cannot we just provide a neural mechanism as with
  the other problems?
• Response because it remains mysterious how and
  why these physical processes are connected to the
  qualitative aspects if experience. When you
  explain integration of information in terms of
  brain wiring, you are done but this is not the
  case with qualia you still have not explained
  why these brain firings are accompanied with
  such-and-such qualitative experiences, or any
  such experiences at all.

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More on the hardness of the problem

• Perhaps the issue is not (at this point) entirely
  clear. In order to understand why Chalmers
  thinks that phenomenal consciousness is a problem
  of a different order of magnitude of difficulty,
  we must carefully examine several philosophical
  arguments.The Knowledge Argument (Jackson)The
  Modal Argument (Kripke)The Explanatory Gap
  (Levine)
• These arguments will help us understand why some
  contemporary philosophers (the Mysterians) have
  come to believe that the problem of consciousness
  might be insoluble.

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The Knowledge Argument

• The article is entitled Epiphenomenal Qualia.
  We know what epiphenomenal means. But what
  does qualia mean?
• Quale/qualia (Def.) the subjective, experiential
  character what it is like to have a mental
  state.

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What is the structure of the argument?

• Jackson says that many people have the intuition
  that qualia are non-physical.
• But he does not want to rest his case on purely
  intuitive grounds. He wants to provide a logical
  argument for his position.
• So What is the structure of this argument?

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The structure of the argument

• Jackson provides a quick glossNothing you can
  tell of a physical sort captures the smell of a
  rose, for instance. Therefore, Physicalism is
  false (127).
• Jackson claims that this argument is clearly
  valid. He maintains that he need only
  polemically argue against his opponents that the
  premise is intuitive.
• But the argument is not clearly valid. (The word
  physicalism does not appear in the premise).
  What are the premises that could turn it into
  one?

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The (reconstructed) argument

• If physicalism, then _________.
• Hint Jacksons definition of physicalism (p.
  127).
• So If physicalism is true, then all information
  is physical information.

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The (reconstructed) argument

• P1 If physicalism is true, then all information
  is physical information. Grounds Definition
  of physicalism.
• P2 There is some information that is not
  physical. Grounds ?
• C Physicalism is false.

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The (reconstructed) argument

• The argument now appears to be valid. But the
  question becomes is it sound?
• Question What reasons do we have for thinking
  that P2 is true?
• This is where Jacksons thought-experiments come
  into the pictureThey attempt to buttress P2 by
  showing that we all have this intuition.

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Fred and Mary

• Fred Suppose that we know all the physical
  information there is to know about Fred. But we
  still wouldnt know what it is like to experience
  red 1 and red 2. So seeing red 1 or 2 is
  non-physical information.
• Mary Suppose that Mary knows all the physical
  information about color perception. But she
  still doesnt know what is like to see red, until
  she leaves the room. So the phenomenal character
  of color perception is non-physical information.
  

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Intuition pumps

• So these thought-experiments show that we would
  all accept the intuition that there is
  information (namely, about phenomenal feels) that
  is not physical.
• But if this is the case, then it logically
  follows that physicalism is false. Jackson has
  completed his project he has shown that there
  are sound arguments against reductive
  materialism.

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Objections?